Henry Aubin: Morality’s decline well beyond politics

Henry Aubin, The Gazette11.19.2012

Henry Aubin

Former City of Montreal engineers Gilles Suprenant (pictured) and Luc Leclerc, who each raked in more than half a million dollars in bribes, are poster children for the emerging guiltless attitude by employees about ripping off the big companies they work for. But it's only one example of the direction society is heading, Henry Aubin writes.Paul Chiasson
/ THE CANADIAN PRESS

MONTREAL — Quebec’s corruption scandals add to the idea of a decline of morality in society in general. What might explain this decline?

It’s a big and complex question. Let me scratch the surface.

We see signs of this trend all the time in reports from across North America. We see it in: widespread cheating in sports (the use of performance-enhancing substances à la Lance Armstrong, for example, and NFL teams’ use of bounties to injure adversaries); mass killings of strangers in public places; the rise of bullying; the frequency of cheating in academia (including by scientists who fudge their research); plagiarizing by writers; cheating on taxes by ordinary people, and in something as unabashed as the running of red lights by motorists (a small but frequent form of arrogance we never saw 20 or 30 years ago).

You also see it in the social irresponsibility of companies. Some of the big ones in the U.S. pay their top managers 400 times more than they do average employees (a differential that has grown 20-fold since the 1960s). The banks helped create the 2008 recession through reckless, anti-social profiteering. And many companies use their political influence on both sides of the border to fight against reform of climate change-contributing practices. Greed, as has often been noted, is not as immoral as it was a couple of generations ago.

But why this attrition in morality?

The waning of religious affiliation could have something to do it. Granted, attendance at religious services is no sure sign of probity (Mafiosi are often churchgoers), but generally speaking, organized faiths have offered ideas of right and wrong that many people have found useful. (The golden rule is hardly controversial.) People are more apt now to judge for themselves what is right and wrong, often based on convenience and self-interest.

That other traditional teacher of morality, the family, is also no longer so sturdy. Parents often took pains to instill values in their children, but today that process can be harder: Many parents have split up, they’re at home less because of the need to work, and they outsource care to strangers at daycare. Television, the Internet and video games — standard pastimes — pose obvious additional problems.

There’s also a decline in role models for young people. For example, the most influential adult male that many boys see regularly is no longer the father, teacher, scout leader or cleric, but the athletic coach. Too often, his message today is less to respect your opponent, play fair and try to win; rather, it’s win, win, win. The bellowing coach has become a staple of minor hockey. The U.S. team coach who ordered a skater to sabotage a Canadian competitor’s skate before a world championship race is an extreme example, but it’s hard to imagine such a directive a few decades ago.

Another idea: Margaret Somerville, the McGill ethicist, notes that people’s conscience often has Swiss cheese-type holes. “(People) generally do right and avoid doing wrong, except with respect to the matters that fall within the holes. So, for instance, stealing ballpoint pens from the office is not seen as wrong, but from your friend’s home or your child taking one from another child’s school bag would be. The larger and more anonymous the entity stolen from, and the more you see yourself as less well off than they are, the less it’s seen as wrong.”

The trend toward huge organizations could play into this. Employees working for large companies or institutions might not see great harm in ripping off their employer, rationalizing that it was too big to notice or to be hurt. Gilles Surprenant and Luc Leclerc, the former city of Montreal engineers who each raked in more than half a million dollars in bribes, are poster children for such an outlook.

Note, too, a decreasing sense of community. In cities, people often don’t know their neighbours or identify with their communities. Teenagers spray graffiti on others’ property. Employees often move from employer to employer regularly and have little loyalty, swiping more than ballpoints; employers for their part often have little loyalty toward their community, sometimes throwing many people out of work as they move to a country with cheap labour.

Surprenant and Leclerc are good examples of employees who have little identification with their workplace: They, like a great portion of the municipal workforce, live outside Montreal Island and are personally little affected by the dilapidation of the city’s finances and infrastructure.

But let’s end on an upbeat note.

McGill’s Somerville agrees that “we’ve lost the values that protect family and community — and that is extremely dangerous. I also believe that the total dominance of the value of individual autonomy in the so-called ‘progressive’ values lexicon is doing and will do a huge amount of very serious harm.

“But — and this might be wishful thinking — I believe the Millennials (plus or minus 20-year-olds) are realizing this and will do something to remedy it. There are some survey results that show that they may hold values that are more conservative than their parents’ values.”

Comments

We encourage all readers to share their views on our articles and blog posts. We are committed to maintaining a lively but civil forum for discussion, so we ask you to avoid personal attacks, and please keep your comments relevant and respectful. If you encounter a comment that is abusive, click the "X" in the upper right corner of the comment box to report spam or abuse. We are using Facebook commenting. Visit our FAQ page for more information.

Almost Done!

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.

Postmedia wants to improve your reading experience as well as share the best deals and promotions from our advertisers with you. The information below will be used to optimize the content and make ads across the network more relevant to you. You can always change the information you share with us by editing your profile.

By clicking "Create Account", I hearby grant permission to Postmedia to use my account information to create my account.

I also accept and agree to be bound by Postmedia's Terms and Conditions with respect to my use of the Site and I have read and understand Postmedia's Privacy Statement. I consent to the collection, use, maintenance, and disclosure of my information in accordance with the Postmedia's Privacy Policy.